Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Anvilania

I bought the game a couple of weeks ago, but still haven’t done much with it. Since I don’t have time for grand, sweeping construction/carving projects, I settled for wandering around to see if I could find a bit of scenery to call home. Imposing at a distance, the impossible peak I’ve come to call Anvilania was my first and only real contender for my point of residence.

Moonset on Anvilania

Of course, it wasn’t just something I could mosey over to and scale. Conveniently, there is a cresting wave of a mountain nearby, so I planned to create a bridge across to my new home. Of course, I had to find a way up the mountain first. I carved a meandering path up the back face of the peak, only to find a chicken had beat me to the top. It mocked me. I briefly considered kicking it off the cliff, but I had better things to do at the moment. Perhaps, if luck was with me, it would wander off into the clouds and fall on its own. (Anvilania’s top surface is above the clouds, but the top of the chute here was within the clouds.)

Cliff Climbing

Cliff Chicken

I’ve tinkered a bit with the free version of Minecraft, and there found that I could build a bridge out into space thanks to the conveniently selective laws of physics. I could just sort of leeeean over the edge of oblivion and place a block, and with enough of this vertigo-inducing cartoon-physics construction, I could have my very own bridge that would have made Frank Lloyd Wright dizzy.

Span1

Basic Lit Bridge

A couple of spans later and I had access to Anvilania. I lit the way with torches and built small walls for the bridge, and took stock of my new home in the sky. Except… it almost really felt more like a shrine. It was livestock-free, and fairly flat on top. There was a single tree in the center of the peak, and a trio of geographical features I’ve found to be great meditation points. There’s the Diving Board, where I can get clear screenshots of a large swath of neighboring terrain:

Diving Board

The Zen Shelf, a natural porch that lets me view the other half of the world , dangle my legs off the abyss and dream of dropping anvils on the barbarians below (Anvil Zen, anyway):

Zen Shelf

And finally, the Pouting Porch, a curious little spot on the island where the only way to safety is back the way you came (without building a new skyrail, anyway). It’s that little corner under the crosshairs, under the torch. It’s a nice place to find perspective, since so many deadly accidents in Minecraft seem to be self-inflicted. This is especially true when playing on Peaceful mode like I am. No monsters, but you can still drown, burn or fall to your death. Anyway, this will likely be where I start to carve my home into the interior of Anvilania. Not much of a front porch, but it should be easy to take care of door to door salesmen.

Pouting Porch

Speaking of dying, though, I just had to test out my high diving skills, since it turned out that there was a nice little pond below Anvilania.

…yeah, water needs to be at least two blocks deep to save divers from bodily injury. Once I found my way back to Anvilania from the spawn point, that was my first project; carving out the pool to make it deeper. After that, I carved a locker room out of the wall nearby (which is really just storage, but since it almost looks like a rec center locker room, I figured it was for pool visitors) and cleaned out some of the nearby sand. This, so I could make glass, of course.

Locker Room

In the meantime, the chicken had found me again, and brought reinforcements. By the time I had enough sand for the glass I wanted, there were three chickens, a cow, a sheep, and two pigs lounging in the pool. I considered keeping them there (since clearing out the pool area had left it impossible to escape), but eventually built a ramp out. I want clean water for my visitors. (The nearby waterfall comes in on the left and flushes water out on the right.)

Critter Pool

I decided I wanted a new path up the mountain to Anvilania, so I set about scouting a path. My first path got too steep too soon, so I abandoned it. I considered carving a spiral tunnel up through the mountain near the waterfall, but decided that would take too long and would be pretty boring. I tried another path up the mountain, and with minimal carving and building, managed to make a nice sweeping path back up to my skypath.

Path Night

Then I destroyed the skypath and remade it in glass.

Glass Bridge

It’s much easier now to see where you can dive from, and now that the water is deep enough, it’s possible to actually enjoy the trip.

Diving Corner, with the pool WAY down there

With that, I jumped once more into the pool, then visited the locker room and emptied my pockets. I wandered off to see what that other big mountain was just across the bay. The swim was refreshing, but it’s alarming how quickly I sink if I let myself. Most disturbing, though… the chicken beat me to the other side.

Foreign Chicken

It was guarding a grave of some sort. (Yes, it came like that out of the random terrain generator. Halloweeny.)

Gravesite

Waterfalls notwithstanding, I’m not sure I like this place.

Looking back in the evening after a nice fried chicken dinner, it’s nice to see my path on the mountain and the torches I lit for the Anvilania shrine.

Path Dusk

I’ll be going back in the morning. I suspect there’s ore to be mined under the mountain. There shouldn’t be any chickens there. Who knows what I might find?

…and that makes all the difference. Exploring and experimenting make me happy.

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

11 Responses

Thanks to you I had to finally try out the free version. The water flooded my stairway and cooled off all the lava. I’m tempted to get the full version, but 10 euros is about 15 dollars and well… that’s higher than my allowance for side games. Yes, I’m cheap.

Well, to be honest, you can get a lot out of the free version. I mostly bought the Alpha version because I can play it offline, and with monsters if I so choose and a few other widgets not in the free one. I can also play it with my little girl (she has her own snowy world), who really likes it.

Still, the basic “go forth and play” sense of the game is alive and well in the free version.

Always fun to read about other’s experiences in Minecraft. As a fellow explorer, I agree that Minecraft really does a good job of scratching that itch to see what’s over the next hill more than any game I’ve played in the last few years.

Very briefly, yes. That’s part of why I like it, actually, it’s fun to see a game elicit that sort of visceral reaction. That’s also why I built the bridge out of glass… and why I want to edit the texture to make it *more* transparent.

Oddly, I don’t get that from WoW… I think the first person camera is what does it. Or maybe I just need to find higher things to jump off of than zeppelins or Tauren mesas.

Carving out a mountain is a.. mountainous task. I’ve been working on mine for weeks. Having fun with it still, but it could take months (or more) with my play schedule.

I did make it to the bottom of the world, and if you fall through, you do die and lose all. It was a lesson learned.

I tried wrangling some chickens (as they drop eggs) – built up high walls around a bunch to make sure they couldn’t jump out. I was sad to see them gone the next day, obviously they are built in some sort of proximity code – that, or your super chicken is out setting them free.

Super chicken scares me. He even managed to strand a cow a few blocks *under* my glass bridge last night on a single square of terrain that the cow couldn’t escape from, save for jumping to its death. I still don’t know how it got there, but the chicken was a few paces away, looking proud of itself…

[…] overworld exploration to cover a lot of ground. I wind up with the Arctic home, the Swamp home, Anvilania, the cliffside village, the Burrows, the tree farm, the diamond mine and so on… a whole […]